FIWARE is launching a new competition: the Global City Teams Challenge Pilot Trials Challenge 2017. Building upon the scope of NIST’s GCTC, the challenge aims to achieve cross-border cooperation in the deployment of groundbreaking solutions based on FIWARE technology.

The FIWARE GCTC Challenge 2017 aims to drive the creation of Smart City pilot trials, designed to be replicable and scalable at a global scale, thus facilitating the creation of partnerships between urban communities in North America, with the companies that are actually providing ‘Powered by FIWARE’ solutions in Europe.

The challenge is open any project that includes at least one city/ community in North America (USA and Canada) and one Powered by FIWARE solution. Additional participation from a European city and/or from a North American organization would add value to the proposal.

Teams will need to propose a development plan, agreed with the candidate city, local government, or metropolitan area. It must include technical issues and regulatory and administrative resources, to be committed by the involved parties. They should meet the technical know-how, the administrative drive and the resources need to design, to implement, to field-test and deploy an application that fulfils the objectives of this challenge.

Up to two trials will be selected in evaluation process. Each of the awarded solutions will receive a prize up to a maximum of 28,000 US Dollars (25,000 Euros), including the costs of the trips to North America and the budget to support the pilot deployment of the solutions.

Submissions will be open soon. Starting in July 2017, entrants will have until October 16th to submit a proposal for consideration. The winner will be announced in November 2017, at the 3rd FIWARE Summit in Málaga. The winners will have a common 6-month period to develop and field test their ideas in the respective cities, which may be presented in the GCTC Expo 2018.

Stay tuned to our site and social media channels for more details.If you need support finding a partner in Europe to fit the challenges of your community or city, please contact us at fiware-gctc-challenge@lists.fiware.org

The 2nd FIWARE Summit, hosted by the city of Utrecht and the FIWARE Lab Netherlands, from Monday 29th to Wednesday 31st of May, has been the prime event organized by an enlarging FIWARE Foundation: with multinational corporation NEC as the fifth Platinum member, joining Atos, Engineering, Orange and Telefonica as the core constituents of the Foundation.

During three days, the Summit gathered 320 attendees and up to 85 speakers, from inside and outside the FIWARE community. 29 countries were represented there. 15 exhibitors showcased their devices, their digital solutions and services at the Media Plaza. The event brought knowledge and hands-on experience around FIWARE through 28 technical sessions and numerous panels, conferences and community meetings.

More than 40% of the audience was part of the Dutch entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem, showing the commitment of the area and the city with FIWARE. Aiming to create an open smart city model, based on the needs of the market, seven cities on the Netherlands have joined the Open and Agile Smart Cities Initiative: Amersfoort, Amsterdam, Drechsteden, Eindhoven, Enschede and Utrecht are betting on FIWARE standards. They all share data portals to ease the re-usage and publication of open data, creating a complete ecosystem that connects cities, business and knowledge.

FIWARE Lab Netherlands, located in Utrecht and Amersfoort, started its activity only two years ago, but it is now well established within the region and the community, running different projects focused on the usage of open data to cooperate in local smart city programmes. It is really great to see this framework, widespreading to other communities in one of the most prosperous areas of Europe.

After a week collecting the figures, the pictures and the presentations, it is now time to go back there, to gather and share some of the vibrant insights that the event has passed on to us.

Cooperation to achieve competitiveness

Collaboration, co-creation and partnership have been the main topics to address the digital transformation in multiple sectors, from a human-centric perspective. In Utrecht, we met some of the FIWARE main partners: Joao Rodriguez-Frade, from CEF Digital and the European Commission, updated on the ongoing collaboration with FIWARE, breaking the silos and enabling digital interactions across sectors. Carl Piva, from TM Forum, elaborated on the vision of the city as a platform and the importance of connecting business models with open architectures and APIs

Working groups and keynotes presented and openly discussed different strategies on how to build a smart city models. We had the chance to meet Deloitte’s Capability Framework and Maturity Model. The TM Forum & FIWARE Frontrunner Smart Cities Workshop gathered different cities that are ahead of this maturity process, like Santander, Bristol, Utrecht, Niza, Tokio or Heidelberg.

From entrepreneurial projects to the Mayor office, a lot of urban development projects were presented. Frans Jorna, Theme Director Smart City of the City of Utrecht, talked about transformation and the need for open city innovation platforms. Ubiwhere presented their FIWARE-based city architecture, a smart solution easing the coordinated management of services for different verticals. Paolo Traverso shared the priorities of the city of Trento, to build an open government with open access to information, simplified access to public services, citizen engagement and enabling co-creation within a no city lock-in approach.

Cities, factories, food (and beyond)

Companies like Whirlpool, Siemens or Volvo, as well as I+D institutions, presented their vision on the whole life circle of a manufactured product or service. Smart Factory vertical integration with standardised open Data Models and APIs is about to create a Data-intensive service reference architecture. In that context, FIWARE is providing an easy way to interoperate with other platforms: when moving a product or service from the supplier to the customer, our open APIs help breaking the data silos, enabling bilateral communication and effective collaboration among stakeholders. A smart supply chain should integrate smart apps, IoT and Cloud platforms.

Carl Hans, from FTI Engineering Network GmbH, explained how FIWARE can support smart product-service design in a sector as diverse as aviation. Thanks to standardised interfaces for service provision and using reliable, well-tested software components, the efforts developing a product could be reduced. Also the risks concerning its obsolescence or availability.

Towards an International Data Space

Lars Nagel, Managing Director of the Industrial Data Space Association, presented the basis and roadmap of this very new initiative, that is already planning on rename itself as International Data Space, due to the cross sector, global reaching nature of its proposed framework for gathering, processing, exchange and monetizing of data among systems coming from different application domains (banking, manufacturing, logistics, smart cities).

The IDS Architecture and FIWARE Architecture are significantly aligned, therefore the FIWARE Foundation and IDS have agreed on a partnership and the work has started for the first open source based implementation of the IDS concepts based on FIWARE. The results will be showcased at the IoTSWC early October in Barcelona.

Acceleration and funding to keep scaling-up

FIWARE accelerators shared their numbers: IMPACT Growth will select 14 startups from 1.932 applications, from which 710 were completed and submitted. The programme offers 3.6 million euros of equity-free funding. The selected startups will be able to start participating in the different events organised by the 4YFN platform. A second call will open for applications on September 5, 2017, and will select another 14 startups.

Among IMPACT Growth four verticals and frontierCities2 MAG and FI-TECH Grants, powered by FIWARE open calls have reached more than 80 countries, receiving more than 2K applications. Our community is an active vehicle for financing innovative projects: Miguel García, from Zabala Consulting, explained how powered by FIWARE startups are in a great position to accede a wide array of funding opportunities, from Horizon 2020 and beyond, highlighting tools like the SME Instrument or the Cascade Funding models.

Acting local. Growing global.

The role of the FIWARE iHubs is helping the development and consolidation of the technology, while building a local community around it. Juan Marcelo Gaitán, support committee leader, represented the FIWARE Zone in Málaga and Sevilla. Two collaborative spaces, offering the knowledge of the FIWARE experts, making the technology available, teaching in the local language, boosting new projects and proposing different ways of granting the sustainability of each iHub.

FIWARE Mundus committee leader, Jacques Magen, described the recent, on course and future activities and events, at an international level. Powered by FIWARE projects continue spreading in North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia, thanks to the Mundus team shared efforts. A first Canadian workshop, focused only in FIWARE have taken place. The Ontario Precision AgriFood Association starting local pilot trial that, eventually, will be leading to a commercial deployment and to the set-up of a FIWARE instance there. A challenge for pilot trials for smart cities will be announced shortly and will be presented at the Global City Teams Challenge Expo 2017, on August in Washington D.C.

A platform, a community and a global marketplace

Hubert Tardieu, Chairman of the FIWARE Foundation BoD, presented our global vision on the industrial data platforms and multisided marketplaces. These would act as the basis to establish symbiotic relationships between stakeholders that can create great value from sharing platforms. Tardieu emphasised on the importance of APIs for the creation of a virtual space for sharing data across organisations, in multiple domains and supporting data sovereignty and data economy concepts. Aligning again with what Lars Nagel presented on his speak.

Announced at the previous Summit, a pivotal tool to the advancement of FIWARE was presented in Utrecht. To grow as an ecosystem and to achieve the marked objectives for the platform, the FIWARE Marketplace is designed to be one-stop shop for every project and deployment based on our open source technology, a useful tool to engage with and to enlarge our community. Juanjo Hierro, CTO of the Foundation, and Mayte Carracedo, from FundingBox, showed the already active webpage: every solution, device, service or deployment based on FIWARE is invited to join in and profit from it, meeting other projects, refining their offering and reaching new clients internationally.

After Utrecht. An towards Málaga (again)

FIWARE’S ambition, as Ulrich Ahle, CEO of the FIWARE Foundation, pointed out, is to lead the IoT platform panorama, driving standards, partnering-up and connecting more than 100.000 developers. We are paving the path for a transition that will happen in the following years: from the consumer Internet to the Industrial Internet and beyond… to the Industrial User Internet.

“Everything that could be connected will be connected. Everything that could be digitized and transformed into data sets will be digitized and transformed into data sets. And everything that could be automated will be automated“. Everything will be transformed and FIWARE is the open source, IoT-enabled platform that lets you join this change.

Ahle also made an important announcement: the next FIWARE Summit already have a location and a date: we are excited to go and gather in Málaga again this autumn, from November 27th to 29th.

We can say it loud and proud: the 2nd FIWARE Summit has been another big success! Thank you!

We keep moving forward thanks to all our community members and partners. A special thanks goes out to our sponsors: KPN, Deloitte, EBU, the Utrecht Region and the FIWARE Lab NL.

Edmonton Research Park and the FIWARE Foundation are joining together to deliver a full-day information session to define and illustrate the many uses and benefits of the technology and the community it has developed.

After the participation of FIWARE accelerators in a workshop in the summer of 2015 and a first FIWARE-based prototype developed at the end of that same year at University of Toronto, FIWARE is now getting more momentum in Canada with a pilot trial envisaged in the agrifood sector in Ontario, and a FIWARE Lab Node being set up in Quebec (more details on both of those will be posted soon!). It is therefore the right time to organise the first FIWARE Canadian workshop, which will be hosted by and co-organised with the Edmonton Research Park. The workshop will be held in Edmonton, Alberta, on June 5, 2017; programme and registration are available at our event page and http://www.edmontonresearchpark.com/events/fiwareinedmonton/2017/6/5/fiware-in-edmonton.

According to Jenni Salonga, Project Lead at the Edmonton Research Park, “We are very enthusiastic to welcome the FIWARE Foundation to Edmonton. Our main goal is to learn how FIWARE technologies can provide value to a company’s productivity, marketability, and scalability. The European innovation community thrives in this ingenuity, and we want to share their experience with our innovation community in the region and across Canada.”

Jacques Magen, Chairman of the FIWARE Mundus Committee, states that “After a couple of years of interaction between FIWARE and Canadian stakeholders, the FIWARE Edmonton Workshop is a great opportunity to finally present FIWARE and some Powered by FIWARE solutions in Canada. We are all looking forward to this workshop.”

The morning session is dedicated to explaining how FIWARE may be used to support and strengthen the local innovation ecosystem; while the afternoon session is targeting developers, entrepreneurs and start-ups. The main thematic domains addressed will be around smart cities and open data, and smart agriculture and agrifood.

The info session and workshop aims to explore the possibility of creating a lab that will be powered by FIWARE. The lab maybe run by an incubator, accelerator, government, university or industry.The atendees will be able to learn how to benefit from FIWARE when developing innovative solutions and applications; see how FIWARE could help strengthen the innovation ecosystem and attract new entrepreneurs and start-ups; and understand how FIWARE could help develop technological innovation and entrepreneurial skills among the students.

As it was stated at the 1st FIWARE Summit, the FIWARE Mundus Committee keeps promoting the usage of FIWARE and the set-up of the FIWARE ecosystems at global level. FIWARE Mundus seeks to enlarge international membership, explore common business opportunities and foster FIWARE nodes and FIWARE instances installations around the Globe.

Following the announced course of action, FIWARE Mundus is excited to present a new participation of the FIWARE community within the context of theGlobal City Teams Challenge (GCTC)programme of the United States. In particular, two workshops that will strengthen the international cooperation in the Smart City domain:

Transportation SuperCluster Workshop, hosted in Portland (OR) on February 1-2. Discussions will revolve around the future of smart transportation and make progress toward creating a shared blueprint of smart transportation technologies for cities and communities with diverse requirements. The FIWARE delegation will count with the support from the cities of Porto (Portugal) and Ancona (Italy), that will introduce an overview of their initiatives and goals; and with the participation of Ubiwhere, a "Powered by FIWARE" company. Besides the involvement in the multiple breakout sessions, FIWARE Mundus will take part in the "Smart City SDK Development Workshop" to present the FIWARE open source development community.

City Platform SuperCluster Workshop, hosted in Kansas City (MO) on February 7-8. During the two-day event co-hosted by NIST, the participants will come in with a list of problems and questions on City Platform and cross-cutting data management issues, and leave with a concept of how to solve that list while building a smart city. FIWARE is an official sponsor of this event, where the "Powered by FIWARE" solutions Wise Town, SmartAppCity and Ubiwhere will showcase their cooperation with the cities of Perugia (Italy), Logroño (Spain) and Porto (Portugal). FIWARE Mundus will take part in the "Smart City Data Sustainment Panel" to present the what FIWARE has learned from European cities in terms of sustainability.

The Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) is a collaborative network of project teams or "action clusters", working on groundbreaking applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies within the smart community environment. These two new workshops follow the continuous collaboration between GCTC and FIWARE through the Mundus initiative, strengthening of the cooperation between cities and companies from Europe and the USA, with FIWARE as the link to ease that joining effort. As the Mundus team pointed before, this collaboration is a “turning point to accelerate the take-up of FIWARE in the USA and in other countries represented in the GCTC”.

It is a joy to be entitled to write something like this: the 1st FIWARE Summit was a complete success!And it is not only something that can be done… it’s a must! This is the appropriate time to point out who is responsible for the Summit surpassing our most optimistic predictions: you.We would like to thank you as part of the FIWARE Open Community for making our first Summit an occasion to remember. We are still reviewing the main assets resulting from the event and we are also focusing on what should be improved for our future events.

At this moment, we can already share some figures: during the 3 days of the event, the Trade Fairs and Congress Center in Málaga gathered 300 participants from 18 countries. The summit comprised 39 tech sessions and 13 business sessions, with the participation of no less than 37 speakers and 32 technical experts. Additionally, 11 exhibitors were showcasing their powered by FIWARE solutions.

Keynote speakers, how-to sessions, working meetings, a developers’ primer the first day, high-level panels on each one of the main verticals and programmes around FIWARE… and coffee breaks, lunches and an evening networking event with food, drinks and music! The 1st FIWARE Summit intended to be the most comprehensive experience possible for all and each one of the attendees.

We had the pleasure to be joined by the local and regional authorities, namely the Mayor of the City of Málaga, Francisco de la Torre Prados, and the representative of the Government of Andalucía, José Sánchez Maldonado (Regional Council for Work, Industry and Trade). Both of them spoke at the opening session, emphasizing the importance of the Summit for a smart city like Málaga and for a region that has always bet on the open technology, like Andalucía is.

In the closing session of the event, Ahle reviewed the main announcements that were made at the Summit. We will be going over all of them in detail, through a series of individual posts. But let’s summarize now what the different initiatives and programmes were presenting.

In brief, FIWARE announced:

The FIWARE Accelerate programme gets renewed, with two spin-off projects: IMPACT Growth and Frontier Cities 2. With more than 5M € to be distributed supporting powered by FIWARE projects, the new calls are announced to be open by the beginning of 2017. Frontier Cities 2 will be focusing on developing solutions for the urban communities, while IMPACT Growth will be accelerating startups across different sectors, including Smart Cities, Smart Manufacturing, Smart Agrifood and Smart Content Verticals.

The FIWARE Mundus Committee will continue promoting the usage of FIWARE and the set-up of the FIWARE ecosystems at global level. FIWARE Mundus will seek to enlarge international membership, explore common business opportunities and foster FIWARE nodes and FIWARE instances installations around the Globe. With Jacques Magen (InterInnov, FI-GLOBAL) as its provisional chairman, the Mundus Committee presented the ongoing initiatives worldwide and the list of action points to be taken in the short and long-term.

The FIWARE iHub programme, designed to act upon the global FIWARE strategy, but at a local level. With the iHubs as physical meeting points for the community, the programme aims to show the path by example, offering coaching and training for developers and SMEs, organizing hackathons, collaborating with universities, showcasing commercial solutions, etc. Also, the FIWARE Zone initiative was presented, starting with two innovation centers in Málaga and Sevilla.

The FIWARE Marketplace was launched during the FIWARE Summit, as a tool to help finding out who is offering solutions and services based on our open source technology. It comprise a list of Powered by FIWARE solutions, FIWARE IoT-ready device manufacturers and providers of both Training and Consultancy/Integration services. The FIWARE Foundation will soon offer professional certifications for FIWARE trainers and certifiers.

The FIWARE Foundation, that was set in motion by theCore Industry Group members (Atos, Engineering, Orange and Telefónica) is now joined by more Gold and individual members. FundingBox –the public funding platform upholding the IMPACT Growth accelerator–, Smart Cities Lab –the think-tank that is currently running the FIWARE activities undergoing in India– and Zabala Innovation Consulting –formerly leading Finodex, the Open Data accelerator– joined as Gold Members. Plus 37 individual members who also have joined the Foundation.

Finally, the Foundation announced the 2nd FIWARE Summit, to take place in Berlin by the end of May 2017. Save the date in your agendas!

We have published a video overviewing what happened in Málaga. You will find it at the end of this post.Each one of the activities in the main rooms were recorded in video. The first day developers’ prime and the panels on days 2 and 3 were live-streamed. You can find them now, in a rough edit, on our YouTube channel. Soon, individually edited videos will be shared.Also, we will be publishing each one of the presentations that were shown at the event. Find them linked on the event’s agenda.

After all this, after all the excitement, the good news and the hard work, it is probably the perfect time to think not only about the FIWARE Community: take a minute now and think about all the people in your life. How did you initially meet? What brought you closer together? From shared interests to specific events, from scheduled activities to casual networking. Each occurrence that build upon the trust, the knowledge, the reciprocity and shared best practices that improves the quality of life within a human ecosystem and make a project thriving and resilient.

Personal relationships are built on a day-by-day basis. And a community like ours is worthing a lot more when it manages to reach new contributors, to convince them to join in and, at the same time, the engagement between present and future members is deepened.The 1st FIWARE Summit has accomplished to do that, enriching our social capital. And that should mark the biggest difference between having a good… or a great future ahead!

With events like this Summit, the community members will be able to keep creating their own value. The platform will be strengthening. The technology will keep advancing and being adopted. New partnerships will be started and people new to and interested in FIWARE will find a perfect chance to be joining the community, joining our global ecosystem. In Málaga, during each one of the sessions, there was a sense of great attention and the will to participate, to be enhancing the hands-on learning process about FIWARE, thus greatly improving the direct and institutional communication and the relationship within the Open Community, always based on merit, transparency and trust.

For the 2nd FIWARE Summit we are looking forward to offer an even better experience for the community members. So, please, if you were present at the 1st Summit in Málaga or followed it online, or maybe you have a notion about how to improve the involvement and participation for the attendants… just write us! Send an email to the FIWARE Press Office.We will love to receive your ideas and we are counting on your support to make the encounter in Berlin the perfect place and time to gather and to keep moving forward. Thank you in advance and thank you, again, for making this 1st FIWARE Summit a great success.

TheGlobal Cities Team Challenge Expo was an exceptional turning point, a successful closing event for the first phase of this initiative and, at the same time, the kick-off mark for a new period of development for the GCTC.More than 2000 attendees and exhibitors joined the Expo live in Austin, Texas. The participants and attendees had the opportunity to hear from keynote speakers and participate on in-depth discussions and panels addressing the present and future challenges of smart cities and the role of synergetic relationships between the cities and the innovative IoT technologies that are spreading and scaling worldwide.

The Expo gathered Federal and Mayoral delegates, industry representatives as well as international and corporate partners, all being part of this celebration of the rich and multifaceted ecosystem that is growing around the collaborative venture to form project teams –the GCTC Action Clusters– . FIWARE’s participation as a Partner of GCTC started last year and now, also a number of our own partners and startups, are part of the Action Clusters.

FIWARE was present at the GCTC Expo as the host for some of those startups and projects, which had the chance to present their digital solutions at the event. Also, FIWARE has been invited to participate in the IES City Framework and joined its mid-project workshop in Austin. The development of a consensus Framework for Smart City Architectures that will grant portability and interoperability among the new cities’ applications and services, is an objective that is shared with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that promotes the GCTC and with other relevant projects, like the Open and Agile Smart Cities (OASC) Initiative, for which FIWARE is providing the much needed technological standards.

The GCTC Expo was also a great opportunity fully in line with the main goal of the FIWARE Mundus Team: to promote the adoption of FIWARE technologies, the enlargement of the Open Source community worldwide and strengthen of the cooperation between cities and companies from Europe and the USA, with FIWARE as the link to ease that joining effort. The Mundus Team pointed this event as a “turning point to accelerate the take-up of FIWARE in the USA and in other countries represented in the GCTC”.

Now that the 2016 Expo is behind us, we are all looking forward to Phase Two of the Global City Teams Challenge. FIWARE and the increasing number of participants in this great venture will be mainly focusing on the deployment and the demonstration of the real impact of new solutions. As Sokwoo Rhee –Associate Director of Cyber-Physical Systems Program, NIST– has put it “We will be able to see how the efforts of 90+ teams can make a real difference in our communities over the next 12 months. Stay tuned!”

We have assembled a video-album with some of the interesting interviews that took place at the GCTC Expo 2016, with startups, teams, representatives and other partners.

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